Diane
wrote: “I do see Harriet as one who runs with the hounds, not with the
hare--she is always looking up to those above her to curry and appreciate
favor, and not one to notice those beneath her. She focuses, for example, on
the kindness (dubious as we might find it) of the petty tyrant Miss Nash
allowing her to peek through the blinds at Mr. Elton, but has no interest in
the Abbots who are left out of the invitation.”
Diane,
you are as usual spot-on, that is a brilliant observation!
I can’t
resist asking---is your “Harriet as one who runs with the hounds, not with the
hare” your sly way of winking at what I wrote 4 months ago about the explicit
allusions in BOTH Northanger Abbey
and Emma to Gay’s famous poem “The
Hare and Many Friends”?:
As my
Subject Line today evidences, it was only in responding to you that I realized—DOH!!—that
the name “Harriet” is pretty darned close to the word “hare”! So add Hare-Yet Smith
to the list of homophonic puns (hare, Eyre, heir, eyer, air) that Jane Austen
(and Charlotte Bronte) played with, as I outlined 3 years ago:
And
that’s just the start, as my Subject Line also indicates--I am so glad you’ve brought
this point up now, because this time, because of the research I did leading up
to my JASNA AGM talk in October, I now am able to connect the dots to another
rich Shakespearean/mythological node layer in Jane Austen’s multi-tiered cake
of literary allusion in Mansfield Park
& Emma, which I will get to
in due course.
But
first some necessary recap. As I summarized in that August 2014 post, Mrs. Elton
alludes both to Gay’s poem “The Hare and Many Friends” and also to Gray’s even
more famous Elegy, in order to
broadly and menacingly hint at Jane Fairfax’s unmarried concealed pregnancy. I.e.,
Mrs. Elton is the proverbial woman scorned who carries on a vendetta against Jane,
whom she blames for Frank –the “abominable puppy who gives her the acrostic
which is actually the “courtship’” charade---deciding to abruptly jilt the then
Miss Hawkins several months earlier on Valentine’s Day. And that is why she right
from the start takes such an otherwise mysteriously strong and insistent
interest in Jane’s “welfare”. She keeps hinting ominously, in code, at Jane needing
to get a late-term abortion (“abolition”) when she goes to work as a “governess”
(i.e., prostitute) at Mrs. Smallridge’s (i.e, in a brothel), a la Fanny Hill,
all in order to avoid the social ruination that would arise if Jane’s pregnancy
were exposed by Mrs. Elton to the gossips of Highbury and London. And Mrs.
Elton’s blackmail almost works, but then Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston save Jane
at the last minute, by pulling the strings necessary to give Jane a safe,
loving placement for her baby without public detection. And so Mrs. Elton’s
final appearance in the novel is the equivalent of a veiled version of “Curses, foiled again!”. And of course, Emma
knows NOTHING about any of this, so the passive reader also does not.
But,
now getting back to Diane’s point--before that miraculous salvation at the end
of the novel, Jane is most definitely the “hare” of Highbury, the “poor animal”
who is dependent on at least some of her friends in Highbury to save her from
the hounds like Mrs. Elton (and her husband) who are indeed hounding and
tormenting Jane during her final trimester, when concealment has become
extremely difficult.
Now Harriet,
on the other hand, as you so correctly point out, has a very different strategy
for setting herself up for (as Emma thinks of it in Chapter 9) “the evening of
life”. Harriet is the illegitimate daughter of powerful people in Highbury who
are not about to fess up to their neighbors that they are the biological
parents of Harriet. Harriet is a pragmatist, like Lucy Steele, and she knows
that she can’t sit back and hope for a miracle---so she decides that there is
no future for her among the hares, she must set her sights on the biggest hound
in Highbury---Mr. Knightley!---and if she mates with him, that will, by the law
of the jungle, automatically convert her and her future children from the
status of hares to hounds. And so she realizes that Emma is the perfect
stepping-stone for Harriet to get close to Knightley, and that is why she shows
up at Hartfield in Chapter 3, once Mrs. Weston is no longer there 24/7 to watch
out for Emma. But Harriet, like Mrs. Elton, is ultimately foiled as well, as
she has to settle for Robert Martin, who, as a prosperous farmer is a kind of mythological
hybrid beast out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
half hare and half hound. ;)
And…speaking
of Ovid, your post also made me realize that Jane Austen would have also been
aware of a mythological source underlying Gay’s famous poem, who appears in
Ovid and several other ancient sources—Actaeon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actaeon
“In
the version that was offered by the Hellenistic
poet Callimachus,
which has become the standard setting, Artemis was bathing in the woods when
the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked. He stopped and
stared, amazed at her ravishing beauty. Once seen, Artemis got revenge on
Actaeon: she forbade him speech — if he tried to speak, he would be changed
into a stag — for the unlucky profanation of her
virginity's mystery. Upon hearing the call of his hunting party, he cried out
to them and immediately was changed into a stag. At this he fled deep into the
woods, and doing so he came upon a pond and, seeing his reflection, groaned.
His own hounds then turned upon him and tore him to pieces, not recognizing
him. In an endeavour to save himself, he raised his eyes (and would have raised
his arms, had he had them) toward Mount Olympus. The gods did not heed his
actions, and he was torn to pieces. An element of the earlier myth made Actaeon
the familiar hunting companion of Artemis, no stranger. In an embroidered
extension of the myth, the hounds were so upset with their master's death, that
Chiron made a
statue so lifelike that the hounds thought it was Actaeon.”
I
haven’t begun to think through a solid interpretation of how the above precis
about Actaeon fits into Emma, but it’s
clear to me that it is part of the mix, both re Jane Fairfax as the pursued
human prey, but also in the way Harriet (supposedly) is set upon by Gypsies
outside Highbury and then is rescued by Frank. That fits with my longstanding
sense that Harriet has made this whole incident up, and in reality she had
trysted with Frank outside Highbury but things got out of control, and so a
cover story had to be made up to account for Harriet’s tumbled appearance. Sorta
like the ambiguous situation between Artemis and Actaeon.
And….I
had Actaeon on my mind as a source for Jane Austen in the first place, because
of my recent talk about the hidden Shakespeare in Mansfield Park, in which I first quoted the following passage in Chapter
34 of MP….
“Here
Fanny, who could not but listen, involuntarily SHOOK her head, and Crawford was
instantly by her side again, entreating to know her meaning; and as Edmund
perceived, by his drawing in a chair, and sitting down close by her, that it
was to be a very thorough attack, that looks and undertones were to be well
tried, he sank as quietly as possible into a corner, turned his back, and took
up a newspaper, very sincerely wishing that dear little Fanny might be
persuaded into explaining away that SHAKE of the head to the satisfaction of
her ardent lover; and as earnestly trying TO BURY every sound of the business
from himself in murmurs of his own, over the various advertisements of "A
most desirable Estate in South Wales"; "To Parents and
Guardians"; and a "CAPITAL SEASON’D HUNTER."”
…and then pointed out Jane Austen’s
sophisticated wordplay (in all caps) all pointing to the assassination of
Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy, and to the myth of Actaeon:
“And note that at this moment of
virtual surrender by Fanny, Jane Austen briefly allows us into Edmund’s mind, and
shows us his thoughts and observations as he tries NOT to notice Fanny being
seduced by Henry, but his subconscious jealousy leaks through, as the words
remind us of that hole in the heart of Julius
Caesar, with the first of what will be several references to a “shake” (as
in Shakespeare) of Fanny’s head, and Edmund’s trying “to bury” the sounds of Crawford’s attack,
which recalls Antony’s coming to bury Caesar, and Edmund’s murmurs to himself
about that ad for a “Capital season’d Hunter”.
“Capital” puns homophonically on the
word Capitol;
“season’d” puns homophonically on the
name Caesar (who of course was stabbed in the Capitol, as Hamlet reminds
Polonius); and
“hunter” refers to the hounds who
tear the mythological Actaeon to pieces, a myth which it is certain Shakespeare
clearly had in mind, as per James O. Woods, “Intimations
of Actaeon in Julius Caesar”. Shakespeare Quarterly, 24, 1,
(Winter 1973): 85-88.” END QUOTE FROM MY
JASNA TALK EXCERPT
So, the fact that Jane Austen had
Actaeon so clearly on her radar screen with the character of Fanny (in whose
heart/hart Henry Crawford, with his hunters, wishes to make a hole) makes it
that much more likely that she has Mrs. Elton invoke Gay’s “Hare and Many
Friends” with Jane Fairfax as another Regency Era Actaeon as well. And..we also
see Jane as a latter day Caesar and hare, both of whom found out that in crunch
time, you may just find out that some of your “friends” will turn on you, and
all you may be able to say is “Et tu, Mrs. Elton?”
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment